A McCarthy Moment At the Alito Hearing

From Sea to Shining Sea ^ | 1/12/06 | Purple Mountains

[PurpleMountains]

I’m sure many of you are too young, and the rest of you probably don’t remember the moment when Senator McCarthy’s putrid career came to an end. I remember it as if it were yesterday; I was a college student at Northeastern University, a cooperative college where you work at a course-related job for several weeks and then go to school for several weeks. I happened to be working at my co-op job at Dennison Manufacturing Company in Framingham, Massachusetts, where the company maintained a recreation area for their employees. We were at lunch watching the Army-McCarthy hearings on TV when Joseph Welsh, that crusty Irish-American lawyer from Boston, while interrogating McCarthy, turned and said to him in a hushed voice, 'until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.' He asked Senator McCarthy if any 'sense of decency' remained in him.

The question, and Senator McCarthy’s reaction focused the country as nothing else could have on McCarthy’s mean-spirited destruction of any person who might disagree with him or get in the way of his march to power. It took condemnation by the Senate and his own alcoholism to formalize his demise, but he was finished as a power in this country as of the moment of that remark by Welch.

[End Times Sentinel]

At first, I thought you were talking about Eugene McCarthy.  What exactly was putrid about a man who rooted out those in our government who were plotting to over throw our elected government and replace it with an ideology that murdered 100 million people last century?

Owl_Eagle

(If what I just wrote makes you sad or angry,

 it was probably sarcasm)

[Noumenon]

McCarthy was, for the most part, dead bang on the money.

[HuntsvilleTxVeteran]

Was he wrong about the communists in government and media?
No, but the far left wing is still trying to kill his message.

[wvobiwan]

Too bad McA completely missed academia and media...

McA was a slacker, not wrong.

[End Times Sentinel]

the far left wing is still trying to kill his message

Yeah, but Roy Cohen was gay, and McCarthy was an alcoholic, ergo, none of the communists that McCarthy rooted out were actually communists.  That's what George Clooney told me.

Don't you know we're supposed to join in smearing Patriots like McCarthy?  Liberals will like us more.  Now bone up on the "J. Edgar Hoover was a cross dresser (even though evidence of this would be worth millions and there isn't any)" and "Dubya was a coke fiend (even though evidence...)".  It's the Gospel.

Owl_Eagle

(If what I just wrote makes you sad or angry,

 it was probably sarcasm)

[highball]

McCarthy was, for the most part, dead bang on the money.

So you believe the Army was riddled with Communists? That Secretary of the Army Stevens was covering it up?

McCarthy was only interested in power. Cronyism of the worst sort. That he cloaked his own ambition in the fabric of a noble cause does not make his motives noble.

[PurpleMountains]

Senator McCarthy was a war hero who turned into an egomaniac who used people's fear of communism to gather enormous power. He succeeded in destroying the reputations and the careers of many innocent people while failing to apprehend any subversives.

[End Times Sentinel]

Which innocent people had their careers ruined by McCarthy?

Owl_Eagle

(If what I just wrote makes you sad or angry,

 it was probably sarcasm)

[PurpleMountains]

We could start with US Senator Lester Hunt and CBS journalist Don Hollenbeck. I could go on, but this all happened 50 years ago. If you don't know by now the kind of man Senator McCarthy was, you never will. By the way, I am a conservative, and I run a conservative weblog, but I'm not a crazy. I invite you to visit my site and see that I am no liberal or RINO.

[jjmcgo]

Owen Lattimore?

[PurpleMountains]

Lattimore, Owen, 1900–1989, American author and educator, b. Washington, D.C. He was educated (1915–19) at St. Bees School, Cumberland, England, and did graduate research (1928–29) at Harvard. From 1920 to 1926 he was engaged in business and newspaper work in China. Afterward he traveled and did research for various organizations in China, Manchuria, Mongolia, and Chinese Turkistan, writing such books as Manchuria: Cradle of Conflict (1932) and The Mongols of Manchuria (1934). He was (1938–50) director of the Page School of International Relations at Johns Hopkins. In 1950 he was accused by Senator Joseph McCarthy of being the Soviet Union's top espionage agent in the United States, but subsequent investigation cleared him of the charges. In 1952, Lattimore was indicted for perjury on seven counts by a federal grand jury on the charge that he had lied when he told a Senate internal security subcommittee earlier in 1952 that he had not promoted Communism and Communist interests; by 1955 all charges against him had been dismissed. He was lecturer in history at Johns Hopkins until 1963. From 1963–70 he was professor of Chinese studies at Leeds Univ., England. Among his other books are America and Asia (1943), The Situation in Asia (1949), Pivot of Asia (1950), Ordeal by Slander (1950), Studies in Asian Frontier History (1962), and Silks, Spices and Empire (ed., with Eleanor Lattimore, 1968). Source: Answers.com

[End Times Sentinel]

Lester Hunt has no one to blame but his son, trying to blame McCarthy for Jr.s being a bath house boy doesn't hold up.  As far a Hollenbeck, he, along with his idol Murrow were communist sympathisers who slanted their storries in the hopes of covering up for their duplicitous friends.  They're no better than Walter Duranty.

Owl_Eagle

(If what I just wrote makes you sad or angry,

 it was probably sarcasm)

[KC Burke]

McCarthy was an easy target due to his perfromance at the end of his career which began with the Army-McCarty hearings. The vast bulk of the communist exposure was done by the House Un-American Activities Committee in which, as a Senator, McCarthy played no part.

Basically, the House Committee's hearings made plain that many departments of government and media organizations were riddled with Communists and Communist sympathizers. They hide and desembled, but they were proven to be there, both then and by the evidence uncovered after the fall of the Soviet Bloc.

McCarthy, who was an extremely popular Air Veteren politician, over reached subsiquently and his personal failings were used as a strawman to make it appear that the vast communist exposures were a fiction.

In truth however, the communists and their agents and proxies were actually guilty as charged in the vast majority of cases and only a small percentage were uncovered then and the Verona Files from the fallen Soviet bloc make that clear.

[jjmcgo]

Lattimore was a vocal advocate for the Communists replacing Chiang Kai-Shek and the former Chinese ambassador testified the Communist revolution was greatly aided by Lattimore, Acheson, Service, et al.
Lattimore publicly advocated that Britain and the U.S. withdraw their influence from Asia and allow the Soviets to expand their influence there. He said communism would bring stability and industrialization to China.
He had close, long-standing associations with numerous people whose names appeared in the Venona papers but his name wasn't found. There is a long FBI file on Lattimore at http://foia.fbi.gov/owenlatt/owenlatt1a.pdf

It's certainly correct to say that Lattimore was one of the most outspoken advocates for Mao's gang to take over China.
Not prosecuted, yes.
Cleared, no.
Basically, Lattimore didn't need or want to be paid by the Soviets for what he believed in.
Also, a longtime good buddy of the Commie VP Wallace that I mentioned earlier.